Billy Graham’s funeral will ‘really be his last crusade’, family says
The preacher had planned Friday’s service as a means of spreading the Gospel.
The Reverend Billy Graham planned his own funeral as one final opportunity to spread the Gospel in what a family spokesman has termed “his last crusade”.
As his public appearances dwindled in recent years, the preacher began choosing songs, scripture and speakers for the event.
Plans for Friday’s service took shape in the years after his final crusade in 2005 as he huddled with confidants and loved ones in his North Carolina mountain home. Musicians who had shared Graham’s stage would sing. Some of the best preachers Mr Graham knew, his own children, would deliver personal messages.
And evoking the Canvas Cathedral revivals that helped launch his ministry seven decades ago, mourners would gather under a tent to pay their final respects. For his family, the idea became capturing the feeling of the crusades that made Graham “America’s Pastor” and the world’s best-known Protestant preacher of his era.
“His fingerprints are on this service for sure,” family spokesman Mark DeMoss said in a phone interview. “The Graham family has long considered that his funeral eventually would really be his last crusade.”
The service features songs from gospel musicians who performed at Graham’s crusades: Linda McCrary-Fisher, Michael W. Smith and the Gaither Vocal Band. They are all friends who sang for Mr Graham at his home in recent years, Mr DeMoss said, adding: “They’re not just artists.”
Mr Graham’s oldest son, the Reverend Franklin Graham, will deliver the funeral message after shorter addresses by his other children. The service, expected to last about 90 minutes, also includes prayers by pastors from as close as Charlotte and as far away as Asia.
Afterward, Billy Graham will be buried next to his wife in a memorial prayer garden at the library, with his grandchildren serving as pallbearers. His coffin was made of pine by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
The grave stone reads: “Preacher of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The funeral serves as the culmination of more than a week of tributes that included crowds lining the road for a procession from the mountains to Charlotte, where Graham grew up.
Still, loved ones said Mr Graham saw himself as a humble preacher who would have been embarrassed by such fanfare.
And most of all, to Mr Graham, Friday’s goodbye marks an end only to his earthly journey.
“Do I fear death? … No. I look forward to death, with great anticipation,” Mr Graham told a Newsweek reporter in 2005.
“I am looking forward to seeing God face to face. And that could happen any day.”
